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Happy Monday, Fintech Takers!

I didn’t get to watch as much of the Olympics as I would have liked, but I did watch the gold medal men’s hockey game between Canada and the U.S. yesterday morning, and it was glorious. I was glued to the game, and when it went to overtime, I made my entire family watch with me, and we basically screamed the entire time.

My goodness, sports are fun. Hellebuyck all game (but especially that save!) Hughes with the busted mouth and the golden goal. The tributes to Gaudreau and his family. I loved every second of it.

Plus, the Celtics beat the Lakers. Great weekend all the way around.

Now let’s get to it.

- Alex

P.S. — There is still time to register for this week’s virtual event (Where AI Meets Reality), featuring me and Alloy’s Jason Ioannides. We are planning to really get into the weeds. It should be a lot of fun. Join us!

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3 FINTECH NEWS STORIES

In an effort (I assume) to get me to keep learning about new industries outside of financial services, fintech companies have begun to offer mobile phone service, embedded within their products.

Sezzle is the latest one:

Sezzle … today announced the launch of Sezzle Mobile, a truly unlimited mobile phone plan starting at $29.99 per month, designed for users who increasingly rely on Sezzle as a single destination for managing their everyday spending. Sezzle Mobile is powered by Gigs, the leader in embedded connectivity, and runs on the AT&T network.

As the newest addition to Sezzle’s expanding ecosystem, Sezzle Mobile allows users to add an affordable phone plan with reliable coverage on AT&T’s network directly within the Sezzle app. By bringing mobile connectivity into the platform, Sezzle is extending beyond checkout and into the everyday moments that power how users shop, connect, and manage their finances.

A little context will be useful here.

A Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) is a company that sells mobile phone service without owning its own wireless network infrastructure. It doesn’t build cell towers and spectrum like Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile. It rents them from those providers and then creates its own plans, pricing, and brand, and handles billing, marketing, and customer service.

Over the last 15 years, each of the big mobile carriers developed its own prepaid/value sub-brand strategy using MVNOs. AT&T bought Cricket in 2014. T-Mobile bought Metro in 2013 and Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile in 2024. Verizon launched Visible in 2018, acquired TracFone in 2021, and launched Total in 2022.

Carriers have often used prepaid brands and wholesale MVNO partnerships to reach more price-sensitive or niche segments without fully repositioning their flagship brands. These offers are frequently cheaper and simpler than flagship postpaid plans, and they may come with tradeoffs like fewer device promotions, different perks, and sometimes lower data priority during congestion.

However, in 2020, a new model emerged.

Gigs, the company that Sezzle is partnering with to enable its mobile service, enables brands to embed mobile plans inside their apps without becoming MVNOs themselves. It describes itself as “Stripe for phone plans,” although Fintech Takes readers might better understand it as the telco equivalent of a BaaS middleware platform. The mobile carrier (AT&T in this case) is like the bank, owning all the core infrastructure and regulatory licenses, and Gigs is the BaaS middleware platform, providing developers with the SIM provisioning, billing, subscription management, and automated support and communication.

Obviously, this telecom-as-a-service (TaaS?) offering is relevant to companies across multiple industries. However, interestingly, fintech seems to be Gigs’ most successful vertical. Klarna, OnePay, MAJORITY, Nubank, and Revolut all appear to be customers, using Gigs to offer embedded mobile phone service to their customers.

To be honest, I was surprised to discover this. Fintech doesn’t strike me as a natural distribution channel for mobile phone service. 

In some cases, it can be. Walmart obviously wants to be a low-cost, convenient distributor of everything under the sun, so OnePay being a Gigs customer makes sense. MAJORITY works with immigrants, many of whom require the ability to make lots of international calls cheaply. And I guess that logic applies, in a loose sense, to Nubank and Revolut as well.

But Klarna? And now Sezzle? 

Their interest in offering mobile phone service doesn’t seem like a natural fit. In some ways, it reminds me more of the interest that Rocket has shown in mortgage servicing; a low-cost way to stay connected with customers and to engage with them more consistently, with the hope of cross-selling them additional products in the future.

Worth trying, I guess. Although they will have some powerful competitors coming up behind them. MrBeast, the proud new owner of a fintech company, is also planning to expand into mobile phone service through an MVNO strategy.

A couple of interesting agentic AI announcements.

First, Google is rolling out support for agentic commerce:

Google is one of a host of tech giants betting that agentic commerce will hit the big time in 2026, rolling out its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) last month to standardise how businesses connect with AI agents across the shopping journey.

UCP-powered checkout is now rolling out, letting US shoppers buy items from Etsy and Wayfair in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, with Shopify, Target, and Walmart coming soon. 

And second, Experian has made its insurance marketplace accessible through ChatGPT:

Experian today announced the launch of the Experian Insurance Marketplace app on ChatGPT, introducing its trusted insurance comparison platform to OpenAI’s audience of millions of consumers.

Everyone who is in the business of enabling commerce (which is a large percentage of the folks working in fintech) is very keen on agentic commerce, but I find a lot of the work being done in the space (at least so far) to be a bit disconnected from the end consumer’s POV.

Why would a consumer use AI to help them shop? In which cases would an AI agent add value for consumers? And where are consumers likely to go for different types of shopping or shopping-adjacent use cases?

These two news stories provide an interesting opportunity to explore these questions.

From my vantage point, Google has an overwhelming advantage in the race to convert e-commerce traffic to agentic e-commerce traffic. The reason for this is simple. Google already owns a large percentage of e-commerce traffic! And as Carlos Caro and I discussed a while back, Google has shown that it is very willing to disrupt its existing organic search experience and search advertising business in order to keep pace in the AI race.

I know this seems incomprehensible to folks living and breathing AI every day, but I need to say it: most consumers have not replaced Google with an AI chatbot as their general-purpose informational tool of choice. 

This means that Google, not OpenAI or Anthropic, is best positioned to capture the shift (to the extent that it happens) from e-commerce to agentic e-commerce, and to eventually monetize it through advertising.

So why, you might ask, is Experian embedding its insurance marketplace within ChatGPT?

My guess is that it has to do with the nature of insurance, as a product, and the experience that consumers go through to shop for it. 

Insurance is complex. It’s opaque. It uses terms that your average consumer doesn’t understand. It’s important (it hedges the risk of very bad things), but it’s not legible.

As such, it’s a difficult thing to research, select, and buy directly through a search engine. Indeed, that’s why marketplaces like Experian’s have succeeded. Consumers don’t want to click on a generic ad in the Google search results and just buy whatever is on the other end. Insurance is a considered purchase, and consumers want a trusted expert to help them with the consideration.

And that’s what makes the idea of having a conversation with an expert so compelling, as the Finextra article explains:

Finding the right auto insurance policy has traditionally involved lengthy forms, multiple websites and unclear comparisons. Many consumers spend hours navigating options without confidence they have secured the best rate. The trusted Experian Insurance Marketplace app transforms that process into a streamlined conversation. Within ChatGPT, users can review coverage options, compare estimated rates from more than 37 top-rated carriers and ask follow-up questions in real time.    

Now, is it guaranteed that OpenAI will win in these conversational AI commerce use cases? Absolutely not. ChatGPT has more than 800 million users, but Google isn’t that far behind. The company recently shared that its Gemini app has more than 750 million users.

Google might win all of the business that agentic commerce puts up for grabs.

Array has acquired Chimney:

New York-headquartered embedded finance platform Array has announced the purchase of local fintech Chimney for an undisclosed amount.

Array is one of my favorite under-the-radar fintech companies. It offers an array (ba dum tss!) of different financial health and digital customer engagement tools and makes them available for banks to white-label and embed into their platforms for their end customers.

Essentially, the brand promise that Array makes to its bank customers is that it will monitor the fintech ecosystem, take note of all the best ideas that fintech founders come up with to engage and help consumers in managing their finances, and then make those ideas into embeddable products for the banks to offer. And because many of those fintech ideas end up being difficult to build viable companies out of (the whole “feature, product, or company?” question), Array ends up adding a lot of these ideas to its platform through acquisitions (MoneyKit and Payitoff are recent examples). Think of it as the embedded fintech equivalent of a PE roll-up strategy.

In this particular case, however, I’m not sure I see as much value.

Chimney has built interactive, embeddable consumer financial tools, such as financial calculators (e.g., for loans, savings, payments), home value tracking tools, and other personalized engagement features that help users explore key financial decisions. 

That’s great, and it sounds like Chimney has gotten a decent amount of traction (the company claims to have over 150 banks and other financial institutions using its tools). However, given the conversation we were just having about agentic AI, I have to wonder — how long will there be a robust market for financial calculators when we all have AI-powered chatbots in our pockets?

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2 READING RECOMMENDATIONS

The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers put out a report about the CFPB. The conclusions they drew seemed fairly wild to me when I saw them, but I haven’t had a chance to read the report in its entirety.

Adam has, and he has some thoughts!

Is BaaS Island bankrupt? Jason (as usual) has the scoop!

1 QUESTION FROM THE FINTECH TAKES NETWORK

There are a TON of interesting questions being asked in the Fintech Takes Network. I’ll share one question, sourced from the Network, each week. However, if you’d like to join the conversation, please apply to join the Fintech Takes Network. 

Is there another obvious potential winner in the agentic commerce race that I am overlooking? 

Google and OpenAI strike me as the most likely winners, given their resources and consumer reach. I know Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa, and others are trying to grab a small share of the pie as well, but in terms of big winners, who am I missing? Amazon? Shopify? PayPal?

If you have any thoughts on this question, reply to this email or DM me in the Fintech Takes Network!

Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email.

— Alex  

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